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Like an Oreo and a Thin Mint had a baby

On Friday afternoon I ran another card sort with members of the CSUMB Design Studio. I brought Candy Cane JoeJoe's to fuel us through Friday afternoon, which one student blissfully described as "like an Oreo and a Thin Mint had a baby."And, voila, I had a title for this blog post.

Their information scheme was a blend of broad categories such as Office & services, Academics, and Important buildings and other smaller, more specific categories such as Technology, Housing on campus, Get help with class, and Graduation. Within the larger categories, they did group the cards into sub-categories. For example, under Academics, they placed CMS, register for class, and add/drop a class together.

They also created an Everything category, which included Login to MyCSUMB, "Because that is everything." Everything also seemed to serve as a catchall for cards like the Printable Resource Guide.

The designers proved their creativity by incorporating markers into the card sort to indicate a relationship between several categories when I didn't have a ball of yarn and box of pushpins ready to go.

This group also made two very good suggestions for cards that should be added: OtterMedia, to go along with Otter Realm, and Find faculty office hours easily, which echoed feedback I'd heard several times during UX Office Hours.

Even with the JoeJoe's, the students hit card sort fatigue about half an hour in. The amount of information is overwhelming, which gives me concerns about the experience users will have when they're trying to use the landing page.

I'm wondering if there are other ways to limit the number of links users see? By using the information we know about students, perhaps we can streamline the number of links that appear - for example, freshmen wouldn't have to see the Capstone or Apply to graduate links? Or maybe the activity itself is just too much? Maybe a closed card sort with predetermined categories would be easier and more effective?

Switching the body text to a sans serif font increases legibility, which is a measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from another. Characters in a sans serif typeface don’t have the tails that serif typeface characters have, which adds space between characters making them easier to read.

Changing the header font to a wider sans serif typeface improves legibility because header characters are no longer compressed, which makes characters difficult to read. We also adjusted the font size of all headers to improve readability, which refers to how easy it is to read words, phrases, blocks of copy such as a book. With…

On Monday, May 22, 2017, Web Services will improve its editor used to create content in csumb.edu.

This will be the first significant improvement to the editor since we launched the last redesign in February 2015.

In addition, we will provide some significant updates to how we create and display key elements, including:Improving how events get made, shared across campus, and displayed on the page.Enabling the ability to "clip" content from one CSUMB site and used on another.Improving how news is displayed on a page.Introducing several new content blocks that will provide more functionality.
Test the new editor
You can test the new editor on a separate site with duplicated content. Our internal user experience team is testing as well and we encourage you to play with it until it breaks. Then tell us about it at webservices@csumb.edu

We will also hold presentations at upcoming Technology Open Labs starting May 5 and running through May 19. Each lab will hold a presentation at …

Coming on Monday, May 22, when we go live with the new editor , you will see a new editing block called “clipping.”

You will be able to clip individual blocks on a page and insert them into your own page. This allows you to publish content that belongs to someone else, and when they update it, the content updates on your page as well.

Screenshots
To start clipping start by adding the clipping block to the page where you want the content of another page.

After adding the clipping block, begin clipping by clicking the begin clipping button.

After clicking "Begin clipping" you will now be in clipping mode. You can navigate to the page with the content you want to clip by using the site's navigation or if you already know the URL you can enter the full URL.

When you are on the page you clip by clicking the "clip part of this page" button to be able to select the blocks you want to clip from the page.